Cardinal Dolan: Birth Control Battle 'Not Fight of Our Making'

Calling it “not a fight of our making,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan said the lawsuit against the Obama administration over its controversial mandate requiring religious-affiliated institutions to provide employees with birth control coverage is a necessity.

“This is not a fight of our making,” Dolan, the Archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, told the New York City local CBS television station.

Dolan stressed the churches are continuing to negotiate with the administration in hopes of getting the mandate fully reversed or changed, but he insisted the threat of legal action had to be a part of the process.

More than three dozen Catholic archdioceses and institutions filed suit in federal courts on Monday challenging the constitutionality of the so-called contraception mandate in Obamacare.

“We knew that probably, sooner or later, we might have to go to the courts,” he said. [We] didn’t want to. [We] were hoping to avoid it.

“I’m hoping that we will get some judicial relief and that the freedom of religion, which is listed as the first of our freedoms in our beloved Constitution, will trump this,” Dolan said.